Rails - Jul 2011 - rails3 tutorial: testing with factories

I''m having trouble understanding what the assigns() method does, as
described at the following link:

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/modeling-and-viewing-users-two#sec:better_user_views

The User model has been ''rake db:test:prepare''ed, but I
checked and no
records were
copied to the test db after doing that.  Yet the description of
assigns() says that the
code:

  describe "GET ''show''" do

    before(:each) do
      @user = Factory(:user)
    end

   .
   .
   .


    it "should find the right user" do
      get :show, :id => @user
      assigns(:user).should == @user
    end
  end
  .
  .
  .
end

''then verifies that the variable retrieved from the database in the
action [where the action looks like this:


class UsersController < ApplicationController

  def show
    @user = User.find(params[:id])
  end


corresponds to the @user instance created by Factory Girl.   I don''t
know where the ''variable retrieved from the database'' comes
from??

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Well, I guess I overlooked this statement at the beginning of the 
section:

==We’ll accomplish this goal with a user factory, which is a convenient 
way to define a user object and insert it into our test database.
==
So calling the factory like this:

@user = Facotory(:user)

does two things:

1) assigns a user to @user

2) inserts the user in the test db

(You never see anything in the test db because the tests roll back 
changes to the db after each test.)

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